In contemporary popular literary culture (Collins 2010), the circulation of representations of reading as a kind of lifestyle is increasing rapidly. I will highlight this phenomenon by way of a discussion of two new literary magazines, the Swedish Books & Dreams, and the British The Happy Reader. Here, reading becomes a lifestyle fully imbedded in contemporary ”designer culture” (Julier 2013), and is metonymically linked to, amongst other things, interior design, cooking, and travel. Which reading practices are encouraged in the magazines, and in what ways do they challenge (or confirm) traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading?

This article deals with an action research project, where a group of university teachers from different disciplines reflected on and gradually extended their knowledge about how to support students’ academic literacy development. The project was conducted within a ‘research circle’ (Bergman 2014), in which the teachers engaged in a continuous dialogue where experience-based and research-based knowledge could meet. The two-year long process was divided into three phases: exchange of experiences and knowledge, small-scale empirical investigations in the participants own teaching, and presentations of the outcome of the research circle work. The main focus in this article is the second phase. The choice of small-scale-investigations, and how they were discussed and developed in the collaborative work, will be foregrounded as well as the changes that occurred in the participants’ teaching practices and how the participants value the outcome of the research circle work.